Love lifts us up

Love is a many splendored thing.Love lifts us up where we belong.All you need is love.I was made for loving you baby.One night in the name of love.I can’t survive without your sweet love.Oh, baby don’t leave me this way.You’d think that people would have enough of silly love songs.I look around me and I see it isn’t so, oh no.Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs.Well, what’s wrong with that.

Alright, enough of that.

But my point is that love is probably the most sung about topics, and we dedicate an issue each year to it — how to date and fall in love, how to keep the love alive, and how to show your love in bed (or in an elevator or the mountains…).

There was a time in the not-too-distant past where all people thought of our community was the things we do in bed. And, while they were doing the same things in bed, they would look down on us and call us bad names.

Oh, what a difference a Supreme Court decision makes. Not to mention Will & Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Ellen and a slew people coming out, gay-straight alliances, guncles, Hollywood, Obama, and Walt Whitman, to name a few.

We two boys together clingingOne the other never leaving, Up and down the roads going — North and South excursions making,Power enjoying — elbows stretching — fingers clutchingArm’d and fearless — eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,No law less than ourselves owning — sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening, Misers, menials, priests alarming — air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing,Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing, Fulfilling our foray.

Pretty heavy and controversial stuff in the 1890s.

Pretty easy to find actual videos of such things within seconds today.

But the emotions of love, the pounding in the chest, the intake of breath as an object of desire passes by, the flushing of the face, the stirring in the loins — none of that has changed.

While the world may be more base with the ease of online dating, porn, sex parties, peeing on future presidents there is still naivete, childlike fantasies, hoping, yearning, and innocent desire in love.

While pessimism, fear, anger, and angst may, for a time, blind the world to the powers of love and romance, let’s hope for ourselves and others that we can eventually whisk those away.